Social Cognition and Aging

描述（由申请人提供）：随着平均寿命的增加，以及面临与医疗保健、财务、临终关怀和住房有关的重要人生决定的老年人数量的增加，与决策能力相关的问题在老年学领域越来越受关注。这一领域研究的一个重点是评估那些可能正处于痴呆症初期阶段或其健康问题有损害其心智能力危险的人的理解和决策能力。然而，了解健康老年人的判断和决策过程如何受到与衰老相关因素的影响也是至关重要的。我们社会的变化导致这些人在各种各样的领域面临着越来越复杂的选择，这些选择对身体和经济健康以及持续的独立有着重要的影响。还有一种情况是，随着家庭变得更加分散，技术变革的速度加快，老年人可能面临在没有充分的社会和知识支持的情况下作出决定的问题。最后，老年人越来越多地成为营销骗局的目标。因此，了解衰老对有效评估信息和做出适应性选择的能力的影响是很重要的。拟议中的研究将通过对25岁至85岁的个体进行一系列7项研究，系统地检查决策和衰老之间的关系。研究的重点是认知能力、情感、经验和动机在决定年龄表现差异中的相互作用。对判断和决策过程的研究也将帮助我们了解许多老年人在面对能力的规范性下降时在这些领域保持有效技能的能力的适应过程。公共卫生相关性：有效的决策是一项重要的适应性技能，对于老年人在日益复杂的世界中独立运作的能力至关重要。这项研究的结果将帮助我们在以后的生活中最大限度地发挥这种能力，通过识别那些使老年人最容易受到不良判断的因素，这反过来应该帮助我们构建决策环境，以最大限度地减少它们的影响。反过来，这应该有助于提高晚年的幸福感。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Issues relating to decision-making competence are of increasing interest in the field of gerontology as the average lifespan increases, along with the number of older individuals who are faced with important life decisions having to do with health care, finances, end-of-life care, and housing. One focus of research in this realm is the assessment of the ability to both comprehend and make decisions in people who may be experiencing initial stages of dementia or whose health problems are in danger of impairing their mental abilities. It is also critical, however, that we understand how judgment and decision-making processes in healthy older adults are affected by factors associated with aging. Changes in our society have resulted in these individuals being faced with increasingly complex choices in a wide-variety of domains with important implications for physical and financial well-being, and continued independence. It is also the case that as families become more widely dispersed and the rate of technological change accelerates, older adults may be faced with making decisions without adequate social and knowledge-based supports. Finally, older adults are increasingly and disproportionately targeted for marketing scams. Thus, it is important to understand the impact that aging has on the ability to be effective evaluators of information and to make adaptive choices. The proposed research will systematically examine decision-making and aging through a series of seven studies in which individuals aged from 25 to 85 will be tested. The specific focus of the research is on the interaction between cognitive ability, emotion, experience, and motivation in determining age differences in performance. Research on judgment and decision-making processes will also help us understand the adaptive processes underlying many older adults' ability to maintain effective skills in these domains in the face of normative declines in ability. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Effective decision-making is an important adaptive skill that is essential to older adults' ability to function independently in an increasingly complex world. The results of this research will assist us in maximizing such capabilities in later life by identifying those factors that make older adults most vulnerable to poor judgment, which in turn should assist us in structuring decision contexts to minimize their impact. This, in turn, should serve to boost well-being in later life.